Ibn Hisham

Abu Muhammad Abd al-Malik ibn Hisham was a scholar of the early Abbasid period, remembered above all for one act of editing that shaped how later generations would read the life of the Prophet Muhammad. He is reported to have been of Himyari descent — that is, from a southern Arabian (Yemeni) lineage — and to have been raised in Basra, in southern Iraq, before settling in Egypt, where he worked and died. His own birth year and birthplace are not securely recorded.

Ibn Hisham did not compose the biography (sira, "life-account") of the Prophet from scratch. Rather, he took the now-lost original by an earlier scholar, Ibn Ishaq (d. c. 767), as transmitted by Ibn Ishaq's pupil al-Bakka'i, and produced an abridged, edited recension. In his preface he explains his editorial choices: he says he omitted material with no direct bearing on the Prophet, certain poems, reports whose reliability he doubted, and passages he judged offensive to readers. He marked many of his own interventions with the phrase "Ibn Hisham said." Because Ibn Ishaq's original does not survive intact, it is largely through Ibn Hisham's version that it is known today, and his recension became the most widely cited early biography of the Prophet.

He is also credited with works on South Arabian antiquity and genealogy, notably the Kitab al-Tijan ("Book of Crowns") on the pre-Islamic Himyarite kings, and is reported to have had grammatical and lexical interests. He is said to have associated in Egypt with the jurist al-Shafi'i.